"'Vagina.' There, I've said it. 'Vagina' - said it again.
I've been saying that word over and over for the last three
years. I've been saying it in the theaters, at colleges, in
living rooms, in cafˇs, at dinner parties, on radio programs
all over the country. I would be saying it on TV if someone
would let me. I say it 128 times every evening I perform my
show."

So starts Eve Ensler's provocative play, "The Vagina Monologues,"
a culmination of interviews with hundreds of women about their,
well, you-knows.

And if Ensler and supporters of the V-Day 2000 College Initiative
have it their way, students from 300 colleges around the world
will be using the v-word just as frequently come next Valentine's
Day.

Coordinated performances of the play began on campuses nationwide
last year with the purpose of boosting awareness about women's
bodies as well as raising funds for sexual-assault victims,
explains coordinator Karen Obel.

This year, more than 50 colleges already are on board, including
the University of Oregon and Cornell University.

Each school that signs up to produce the piece on Feb. 14
will donate profits to the designee of its choice, such as
the department or organization sponsoring the production,
the V-Day fund or local organizations working to stop sexual
violence. In 1996, the Justice Department estimated somewhere
in the United States a woman is raped every two minutes, the
press kit stated.

That's a main reason Obel says she jumped headfirst into
the school-based project after the play's 1998 debut.

"At the end of the first event, Eve (Ensler) came out on
the stage and asked people to stand if they were victims of
violence or knew people who were," she says. "Almost the whole
audience stood, including myself."

Performed in New York City, the premiere featured celebrities
like Whoopi Goldberg, Rosie Perez and Winona Ryder, and was
catered by CPNet's own Chef
Rossi. ("Susan Sarandon ate the strategically placed sun-dried
cranberry in the giant dried fruit vagina," Rossi relays.)

The Big Apple event inspired Obel to supervise the annual
College Initiative -- a position that puts her in contact
with students like Danah Beard from Brown University.

Beard, who directed one
of the 65 on-campus V-Day celebrations last year, says
the Brown event included about 100 volunteers and sold out
each show within hours. But she has even grander plans for
February 2000.

"This year, I want to move forward. I am hoping to make a
bigger deal out of it -- have a Vagina Week. I want to put
the play in a more appropriate place, making it more accessible
and comfortable to a larger audience," she says. "... I want
to promote pride in our womanhood from every direction."

The computer science major says the female-centric show liberates
men as well.

"('The Vagina Monologues') gives women a voice to speak about
a topic that is so culturally suppressed. TVM also gives men
a voice to listen to when the women around them are unable
to express their feelings," she says. "Most men involved in
the production came to me and told me that they appreciated
that we would involve them because they want to help but don't
always know how."

Mary Duffy, an gender studies administrator from the playwright's
alma mater, adds, "The message of this play explodes the notion
that women must keep their sexuality under wraps."

Duffy, who didn't know Ensler had graduated from Middlebury
College in 1975, had begun considering a performance of the
"Monologues," even before the Initiative was proposed.

But the national support "made it happen" at the Vermont
school, she says. Students publicized the campus event, which
raised $500 for a local battered-women's shelter, by passing
out leaflets with medical drawings of unlabeled female genitalia
headlined, "Test Your Knowledge." On the flip side of the
handouts were the correct names and show information.

"Some of the college women couldn't deal with the graphic
image - they found it 'disgusting,'" Duffy says. For emphasis,
the publicity was distributed during meals outside the school's
dining commons.

"TVM demonstrates the importance of art in the process of
unlearning our fear and revulsion of that collection of organs
which are the site of such pleasure and wonder," Duffy says.